[ERS]:Newly Made Mason by H. L. Haywood, Chapter 5
george helmer
CHAPTER V
"Antient" Masonry
IN AND ABOUT the year 1740 A.D., Ireland belonged as much to Great
Britain as England did, or Scotland; English families lived in
Ireland,
Irish families lived in England, and Ireland had its own share of
peers
in the House of Lords as later it was to have its own share of members
in the House of Commons. So was it with Freemasonry. The Grand Lodge
of Ireland was recognized by it - in a day when a Mason could belong
to as many Lodges as he wished more than one was a member of Lodges
in Ireland and Lodges in England at the same time; there was freedom
to visit and freedom to demit. If a member of a regular Irish Lodge
lived in London he was as much of a Mason in the eyes of his Brothers
there as any member in a London Lodge.
In the 1740's Ireland suffered from a series of the potato famines
which for more than a century were a curse to the country as
disastrous
as war; in the larger number of these famines it was the Irish peasant
who had suffered most tragically, but in these famines of the 1740's
men and women starved to death in the towns and cities, and first and
last one or two millions fled to other countries. Among these were
a large number of small professional men, skilled workmen, and small
tradesmen who, because they had relatives or friends there, moved to
London. Among these emigrants a sizable number, two or three hundred
perhaps, were members of Irish Lodges.
According to the Ancient Landmarks, rules, and regulations these Irish
Brothers had the same rights to visit and to demit as London Masons,
nevertheless when they sought to do so they were turned back at the
door and the reason they were turned back was made abundantly clear
to them when they were told that too many of them were carpenters,
plumbers, stone-masons, teamsters, and similar members of the "lower
classes," and the officers of London Lodges, being aristocrats and
gentlemen otherwise of fastidious tastes refused to foregather in the
Lodge Room or to sit at a table with anybody from the "lower classes."
These gentlemen were wearing a workingman's leather apron; they had
accepted working tools at the time they took their obligations; they
were officers in a Craft which had been founded, and for centuries
had been exclusively manned by workingmen, but even their own noses
sharpened by the insolence of their class, could detect no
self-contradiction
in their refusing to sit with Masons in a Masonic Lodge if a Mason
was a carpenter. Jesus of Nazareth could not have visited such a
Lodge.
This snobbishness was an extraordinary and fateful result of the
"modernizing"
of the Fraternity which was then under way, and of which boasting was
being made.
After it became apparent that this exclusiveness had become a rule,
and was not a temporary aberration, a number of these Irish Masons,
with the assistance and approval of the Grand Lodge of Ireland,
constituted
a few Lodges of their own, as they had an inherent and a
constitutional
right to do, and could do so with no violation of the Jurisdiction
of the Grand Lodge in London, the law of Exclusive Territorial
Jurisdiction
not yet having been enacted. During this same period a number of
Lodges
on the List of the Grand Lodge at London (which had been constituted
in 1717 A.D., by four old Lodges of which only one had a membership
of "gentlemen") became so resentful at this new exclusiveness, and
so violently disapproved of the innovations of which the Grand Lodge
had become guilty, that they began to withdraw from it, and did so
in such number that at a later time some 135 of them had been counted.
By the end of the decade of 1740 - 1750 A.D., where one Irish Mason
withdrew himself from the Grand Lodge at London, ten English Masons
had done so. Along with them, and agreeing with them, were a hundred
or so independent regular Lodges (called St. John's Lodges) which had
never been on the Grand Lodge's Lists. This refusal to recognize the
so-called "modernizing" of Freemasonry reached such a pitch at the
last that the Grand Lodges of Ireland and Scotland withdrew
recognition
from the Grand Lodge at London. (It is called "Grand Lodge at London"
because England was not at the time a single Grand Jurisdiction, and
was not to become one until 1813 A.D.; there was, in any real sense
of the name, no Grand Lodge of England. When the Grand Lodge of All
England at York gave itself that title it only meant that it was
willing
to receive into its membership Lodges from any part of England.)
After they had set up two or three Lodges of their own, each of which
was regular and duly-constituted and so recognized by the Grand Lodges
of Ireland and Scotland, they first formed a Grand Committee as a
center
of union; this Committee they made into a Grand Lodge, by the usual
regular and duly-constituted method, in 1751 A.D. To show that it had
repudiated the "modernizing" of Masonry, and would never in the future
approve or accept it, it gave itself the title of a Grand Lodge
"according
to the Antient Institutions," and for that reason came everywhere to
be called "The Antient" Grand Lodge, not in slang, or in derision,
but seriously and respectfully. (Masonic writers preserve the t in
the spelling to distinguish the Grand Lodge called by that name,
first,
from "Ancient Freemasonry," where the age of the Craft is meant and
second from "Ancient Freemasonry" in the sense of that which we now
call Ancient Craft Masonry.) The Antient Grand Lodge was a single
Grand
Lodge, with headquarters in London, and had no jurisdiction over
anything
except the Lodges on its List.
Under normal circumstances one Grand Lodge would have been but one
among many, and the Antient Grand Lodge would not have loomed up in
the Craft at large until at one time it almost filled the horizon;
its name would never have been used to describe a great new stage in
the development of the Fraternity, a development without which we
could
never have had a worldwide Fraternity; it would not now stand in our
histories alongside the Grand Lodge of 1717 A.D., and with an
importance
second only to that Another Grand Body; but the circumstances were
not normal in Freemasonry at the time, and as the event was to prove
a half century later. the Antient Grand Lodge itself, along with the
Modern Grand Lodge was to be swept up, and enveloped and carried along
by that universal groundswell which was to make the Fraternity
universal
in actual fact as it always had been potentially and in principle.
The Grand Lodge of 1717 A.D. (which kept a separate existence until
1813 A.D.) is not correctly called "The Modern Grand Lodge" except
during the forty years or so in which it was guilty of the innovations
of class distinctions, exclusiveness alteration in the nature of
Masonic
offices, emasculation of the Ritual, etc. If by "Antient Grand Lodge"
is meant a Grand Lodge which waged open warfare on that
"modernization,"
which worked aggressively to recover and to secure the ancient rules
and customs, that name similarly can be correctly used by the Grand
Lodge of 1751 A.D., only during that same chapter in Masonic history;
for when the Lodges under the older Grand Lodge had ceased to carry
on those innovations there was no difference between the Work done
in the Lodges under the one and the Lodges under the other; any time
after 1790 A.D., the two could have coalesced as they were to do in
1813 A.D.; therefore if by "Antient" is meant that which was opposed
to "Modern" the Grand Lodge of 1751 A.D., itself ceased to be
"Antient"
after the Grand Lodge of 1717 A.D., had ceased to be "Modern."
At about the time of the American and the French Revolutions (1775
-1795 A.D.) Freemasonry entered that period of universality in which
it now stands and the transition from a Fraternity primarily British
and European into one genuinely world-wide, with a center nowhere
because
its centers are everywhere, was the opening of a new era in our
history
scarcely less epoch-making than the founding of the Grand Lodge
System.
The Antient Grand Lodge did not by itself inaugurate or control the
entrance of the Fraternity into its era as a world-wide Fraternity
but it contributed so much to that end that its contributions are its
title to fame. (Newly Made Masons will discover that the account of
the Modern as the Antient Grand Lodges which they will find in the
Masonic histories written before 1900 A.D., very different from the
account being given here; with a few exceptions the facts about the
Antient Grand Lodge were not discovered until about 1900 A.D., and
even now are not widely known or clearly understood and universally
accepted.)
1. Although the Antient Grand Lodge of 1751 A.D., had on its list only
a few Lodges to begin with, and they were an Irish membership, it lost
this Irishism in a short time when scores of English Lodges began to
accept its Jurisdiction. Except in its formative period it was as
English
as the Grand Lodge of 1717 A.D.
2. It had the great good fortune to have as its Grand Secretary
Brother
Laurence Dermott from 1752 A.D. to 1771 A.D. R. F. Gould described
him as a callous-handed house painter with little education; that was
because almost nothing was known about Dermott when Gould wrote his
history. Born in Dublin in 1720 A.D., Dermott became a Mason in 1740
A.D., and served as Worshipful Master in 1746 A.D., shortly after
which
he moved to London, where he was elected Grand Secretary of the New
Grand Lodge at the early age of thirty-two. He died in 1791 A.D.
Dermott
was what Eighteenth Century men called a genius, a small class of
great
men of which Christopher Wren and William Shakespeare were more famous
specimens. Dermott was an interior decorator in early life but after
1753 A.D. (and like our own Brothers A. G. Mackey and Albert Pike)
Freemasonry became his profession. He had many talents, and they were
of a high excellence; he was a learned man (he could read Ancient
Hebrew),
a forceful and even powerful writer as is proved by the Book of
Constitutions
which he wrote, a singer, an after-dinner speaker to hear whom men
drove many miles, an organizer and administrator, a driving, daring,
bold, tireless, ingenious, inventive, undiscouragable character, who
withal had a great and an almost instinctive understanding of
Freemasonry.
Who were the greatest Masons (and as Masons) of that century?
Desaguliers?
Preston? The Duke of Sussex? Thomas Smith Webb? If so Dermott belongs
to the list because he ranks second in achievement to none of these
names.
3. The Antient Grand Lodge used the Modes of Recognition and the
Ceremonies
of Installation according to ancient usage, and instead of
emasculating
the Ritual did the opposite, restoring the Work to its full
plentitude,
permitting nothing to interfere with it, emphasizing its primary
importance,
enacting it instead of reducing it to lecture form, and in addition
officially approved the use of the Royal Arch Degree. With this
doctrine
of the importance of the Ritual, and each item of the Ritual in its
full form, the Grand Lodges of Scotland and Ireland were in agreement,
and the majority of Lodges in America afterwards came into agreement.
The emasculated, localistic, and very British version of the Ritual
used so half-heartedly in the "Modern" Lodges would never have carried
Freemasonry over the seas and around the world, partly because it was
too meager, and partly because it was too British - a Lodge could use
the "Modern" version only halfheartedly because its Ritual and its
practices contradicted each other; if anything is true of the Ritual
it is that one of the cornerstones of it is that Masons "meet upon
the level," and another cornerstone is that any Master Mason may hold
office. (A Newly Made Mason ought to note that any question about the
Ritual is a question of what Freemasonry is or is not, because in one
form or another, directly or by implication, literally or
symbolically,
the Ritual is a series of statements about what it is to be a Mason
- it is the means by which a Lodge "makes" a Mason. To omit something
from the Ritual is to omit it from Freemasonry.)
4. The Antient Grand Lodge employed Ambulatory (or Travelling)
Warrants
for Lodges, and Ireland began their use at about the same time. The
practice was begun as an expedient; it was useful during a period in
which world Masonry was in process of formation, but except in a few
Grand Jurisdictions it is no longer permitted; but it was while it
lasted an agency which played a large part in Masonic history. An
Ambulatory
Warrant usually was issued to a Lodge composed of soldiers or sailors;
it gave the Lodge a name, a number, and a first address, but expressly
permitted the members of the Lodge to carry the Warrant with them and
to act under it at any place in which they might be stationed - thus
a Lodge might receive a Warrant while its soldier members were
stationed
in Ireland, the Lodge might move to one or two stations in England,
then to Canada, then to the American Colonies, then to India; many
Lodge histories show an itinerary of that type. The practice was
continued
in the United States for three-quarters of a century after the
Revolutionary
War; many Lodges in Texas, the South-west and the Far West worked
under
charters carried about in wagons or saddlebags. The practice explains
why there were so many Lodges in the armies on both sides in the
Revolutionary
War, it explains why Lodges were set up in so many remote parts in
Asia at so early a date, and why Freemasonry was carried literally
over the world in only one or two generations.
5. Fundamental in the Antient Grand Lodge was the invincible
determination
that in each and every Lodge everywhere it should be the first duty
of the Craft to keep inviolate that Ancient Landmark which ordains
that Masons "meet upon the level," that once a man has been Raised
to the Sublime Degree of Master Mason no Mason shall stand higher or
lower in any scale than he does - an Earl of Moira or a Duke of Sussex
might preside in its Grand East but if so he would preside there as
a Mason, and not as duke or earl. There is a principle in any
aristocracy
and its corollaries of exclusiveness and snobbishness with which
historians
have not dealt as they should, which sincere apologists for
aristocracy
overlook, and which defenders of it try to evade; it is the principle
that the amount of exclusiveness and snobbishness increases in
geometric
ratio in proportion to the distance from the center (or base) of the
aristocracy in question. If I take it that I belong by right of
heredity
to an upper class, where you by your own heredity belong to what I
take to be a lower class, I shall look down on you and exclude you
from my circle even though you are also a man and a fellow countryman;
but I shall increase that exclusiveness toward a man from the
Colonies;
and then I shall increase it once again, treble it perhaps, toward
a man of the Yellow Race; and I shall then quadruple it toward a man
of the Black Race. If Freemasonry had not sincerely and wholeheartedly
adopted the principle that any qualified man of any race or creed is
eligible to petition, and that each Master Mason stands on the level
with every other one, it would have been confined to the British Isles
or at least to English-speaking peoples, and could never have
established
itself in fifty or sixty countries among men belonging to the three
great Races, and fifty or sixty sub-Races.
6. Finally, by officially endorsing and practicing the Royal Arch
Degree,
and by having Ireland and Scotland unite with it in so doing, the
Antient
Grand Lodge established in the Craft the principle of the High Grades;
and since it thus established it the principle has never been called
into question. The point is one which calls loudly for attention which
it has never received; it calls also to be re-appraised by our Masonic
historians because their absorption with the internal histories of
the High Grades has thrown no light on the very great importance of
the High Grades in assisting to make it possible for ours to become
a World Fraternity. The Ancient Craft Freemasonry embodied in the
Three
Degrees is undoubtedly Operative in origin; Operative in its bone and
marrow; but it also is in its bone and marrow English Operative - it
owed so little to Operative Freemasonry in Europe that after 1717
A.D.,
European countries had to import Speculative Freemasonry from England.
Now the Ancient Craft Ritual has much to say; it has so much to say
that it says everything; but it says it in a form native to English
speaking peoples. It is the great function of the High Grades in World
Masonry to say that same thing, and then to go on to say it in another
form - thus, and to give only one example, it is a fact, provable
by endless written records and statistics, that the idiom of Scottish
Rite Freemasonry is peculiarly appealing and intelligible to men in
Latin countries. The more than forty Degrees of the whole system of
the five Masonic Rites give Freemasonry an amplitude and flexibility
of voice by which to make itself understandable to men in any of the
world's cultures. To establish the principles of the High Grades
officially
and permanently inside the Fraternity was not accomplished by the
Antient
Grand Lodge but by a consensus of many Lodges in many lands, and
helped
to inaugurate the era of World Masonry, but it was the Antient Grand
Lodge which first saw the true principle of the High Grades, and it
belonged to its historic mission to be the first Grand Lodge to act
upon it.
The history of the Antient Grand Lodge is thus composed of two
histories.
There is a history of it as a single Grand Body in London, born as
it was through default in the Grand Lodge of 1717 A.D., in rivalry
(most of it local) with that Grand Lodge, and conscious of having the
mission to restore to the Craft in England certain ancient usages and
customs; that history, so often told, is colorful and sometimes
dramatic,
but in the whole sweep of the Craft's history or against the
background
of World Masonry it dwindles into comparative insignificance. The
other
history is the story of the rise within the Antient Grand Lodge, and
almost coincidentally in the Grand Lodges of Ireland and Scotland,
of the beginnings of, and preparations for, that which was to become
World Masonry. That movement was in itself too large for any one Grand
Lodge; it drew the Grand Lodge of 1717 A.D. into itself (William
Preston
helped to bring this about), and in time drew every regular Grand
Lodge
into it.
POTS
George Helmer FPS
PM Norwood #90 GRA
H Norwood #18 RAM